Was C. G. Jung a Mystic?

Foreword

After Aniela Jaffé’s memorable collaboration with C.G. Jung on his life story, Memories, Dreams, Reflections¹ and painstaking work on his Letters,² and after her illustrated Jung biography, Word and Image,³ and The Myth of Meaning,⁴ among other efforts, it is a pleasure to be able to present a new selection of essays from her prolific German writings, many of which still remain to be translated. All four of the essays in this volume are published here for the first time in English.

The title piece, Was C.G. Jung a Mystic?, the author’s latest contribution, appears for the first time in any language. As in Frau Jaffé’s other writings, she here approaches the life and work of her subject from many angles, providing insights which are the rich fruit of her long years of close association with Jung.

The Romantic Period in Germany consists of a key chapter from Aniela Jaffé’s untranslated literary work, Bilder und Symbole aus E.T.A. Hoffmanns Märchen ‘Der goldne Topf‘⁵ (Images and Symbols in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tale, ‘The Golden Pot’). This major effort of some 380 pages occupied her for more than ten years before its publication in 1950 along with essays by C.G. Jung in a volume entitled, Gestaltungen des Unbewußten (Figures of the Unconscious).⁶

The Individuation of Mankind was originally presented in German as a paper at the Eranos Conference in Ascona in 1974, and subsequently published in the Eranos Yearbook.⁷

The fourth and last essay in this collection, Transcendence, based on her conversations about post-mortal existence with C.G. Jung in the final months of his life, was written in 1985 and published for the first time in Aniela Jaffé’s recent book in German, Themen bei C.G. Jung.⁸

This latest little collection of essays, written over a period of nearly half a century, is at once both ‘modern’ and timeless, and it is highly appropriate that these writings by Aniela Jaffé also become available to readers of English.

Robert Hinshaw

1. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé (transl. R. and C. Winston), Pantheon, New York, 1962.

2. C.G. Jung: Letters, edited in German by Aniela Jaffé and in English by Gerhard Adler, transl. by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton and Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York and London, 1973-75.

3. C.G. Jung: Word and Image, edited by Aniela Jaffé, Princeton, 1977.

4. Aniela Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning, orig. 1970, 4th edition Daimon, Zürich, 1986.

5. Aniela Jaffé, Bilder und Symbole aus E.TA. Hoffmanns Märchen ‘Der goldne Topf,’ orig. 1950, 3rd ed. Daimon, Einsiedeln, 1986.

6. C.G. Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Gestaltungen des Unbewußten, Rascher, Zürich, 1950.

7. Eranos-Jahrbuch 43, Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema, Editors, Brill, Leiden, 1974.

8. Aniela Jaffé, Themen bei C.G. Jung, Daimon, Zürich, 1985.

Was C.G. Jung a Mystic ?

C.G. Jung did not like to be regarded as a mystic: he preferred to be recognized as an empiricist, i.e., a scientist whose research is based on a careful observation of facts. In this sense, he thought of himself as a natural scientist. One can understand why Jung disliked being included in the ranks of mystics when one considers that in his time, and essentially also today, to characterize a scientific author as mystic casts a doubt on the reliability or validity of his ideas and his work. Mystical statements are not to be included in the natural sciences. Nevertheless, the clear analogies that exist between mysticism and Jungian psychology cannot be overlooked, and this fact in no way denies its scientific basis.

If the concept mystic suggests the immediate experience of the numinous or the perceiving of an originally hidden transcendent reality, the other side, then it involves an experience which also plays a central role in Jung’s approach to analytical psychology; that is, the consideration of images and contents which enter into consciousness from the hidden background of the psyche, the collective unconscious. Nevertheless one must bear in mind that Jung’s language and his scientific ideas differ from the language of the mystics, and this difference is significant. Whereas the mystic is content with his belief in the objectivity of his experience, these experiences are subjected by Jung to a critical examination. By taking into account the fundamental science of knowledge (Immanuel Kant’s erkenntnis-theoretische Differenzierung), he established the basis for the inclusion of his observations in the science of psychology. According to this view, one proceeds from the fact that the background of the psyche, the collective unconscious, must be conceived of as a realm with neither space nor time that eludes any objective knowledge. What we perceive are its effects. In itself, it remains concealed, unknowable. "The concept of the unconscious posits nothing, it designates only my unknowing," wrote Jung in a letter⁹ and elsewhere he states, The unconscious is a piece of Nature our mind cannot comprehend.¹⁰

The concept of the collective unconscious has passed into general usage, just as the concept of its contents, the archetypes. So let us stress one fact essential to our questioning but which is often overlooked and has therefore become a source of misunderstanding. Jung distinguished between the unknowable archetypes in the hidden impenetrable realm of the unconscious and the comprehensible archetypal images and contents structured by them that can be recognized in dreams, fairy tales, works of art, religions and so forth. It was the similarity or inner relatedness of such images in myths and in cultures of all times that had originally led him to presuppose the existence of a common transpersonal denominator: the archetypes. By this he meant inborn dispositions that play a role in the realm of the psychic, in the same way as the structuring instincts in the realm of the biological. One could also say the archetypes are spiritual instincts.

Scientific psychology is limited to the observation and study of accessible archetypal images and contents, in other words, human assertions that nevertheless may not be taken to be objective knowledge about what transcends consciousness: the metaphysical. They remain in the human-psychic realm. Jung spoke of psychic facts. He restricted his research to these, and in so doing continually stressed the importance of the epistemological limitation formulated by Kant. Insofar as his research was limited to these facts, he was justified in calling himself an empiricist.

The archetypes as such, contents of the collective unconscious, remain unknowable and removed from the reach of objective scientific research. Still, it is a valid hypothesis that the archetypal images, as symbols, refer to the incognizable transcendental archetypes, by which they are themselves structured. In this way they build a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious.

It is known that the natural sciences have also arrived at the boundary of the objectively knowable.¹¹ They also recognize a boundless mysterious field behind all life (Adolf Portmann), a transcendental and autonomous order, to which the psyche of the observer, as well as that which can be observed are subordinate. (W. Pauli)

The strict and conscious observance of the epistemological limitation leads the natural sciences as well as psychology to the acceptance of an incomprehensible background realm that is without space and time. Throughout the ages human beings have longed to penetrate its secret and make it accessible. Thus the splendid body of metaphysical thought, the content of mysticism, and of religions came into being. As images and contents created by man they bear witness to an immeasurable richness of the soul. Thus, according to Jung, "It is the psyche which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion … not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality."¹²

Jung himself refused to make any statement about the transcendental background, except to say that it exists. In his words, That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental background is as certain as our own existence.¹³ That this background remains hidden does not reduce its significance. One could say: quite the contrary. For Jung, precisely the inability to know in this connection signified, in his own words, a richness and a treasure that he sought always to preserve. An ethical researcher can acknowledge when he reaches the end of his knowledge, as this end is the beginning of a higher wisdom. The incomprehensible nature of something that is nevertheless effective imparts the sense of a Mysterium that transcends the human and simultaneously encompasses him.

These brief comments serve only as a necessary sketch of the psychic structure. The real question posed here is: how does the individual experience the unconscious? And how does he experience the archetypes or the archetypal contents, the symbols?

The immediate experience of archetypal contents is by no means an everyday event, and in most cases the individual reacts with deepest emotion, occasionally with fear. Two examples will show that the emotion springs from a feeling of helplessness on the part of the individual or ego-personality with respect to forces that arise from his own psyche, but which he none the less cannot control. Without his cooperation, without his willing it, archetypal images emerge from a realm that transcends consciousness and work their powerful effects. They seem to be characterized by an intentionality, a dynamism or an autonomy, and it is